First Look! Battlestar: Galactica
Source: EW!
Gotta love those wily scribes at Battlestar Galactica. The fourth and final (sniff!) season of the acclaimed Sci Fi series doesn't yet have a set air date—a rep says look for it early next year (more on that in a bit)—so for an appetizer, the show's cooked up Razor, a two-hour flashback episode airing Nov. 24. (An extended-cut DVD hits shelves Dec. 4.)
The story is ostensibly about the first mission of the (now-lost) Battlestar Pegasus under the command of Lee Adama (Jamie Bamber), which falls roughly in the latter half of the second season. It's told, though, through the eyes of new character Kendra Shaw (Stephanie Jacobsen). ''Lee promotes [her] to be his [second-in-command],'' explains show-runner Ronald D. Moore, ''and you wonder, who is this woman?'' That question, says Moore, allows the show to explore ''a lot of things that we've talked about or alluded to but never actually seen. You start flashing all the way back to before the Cylon attack on the colonies, to who she was, how she came to the Pegasus, what happened to them, and what was their story before they met up with Galactica.''
The Pegasus backstory means that yes, the hard-bitten, uncompromising Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes) will be returning, much to the delight of the writers. ''Everyone sat up [in the writers room] and said, 'Yeah! Let's do something with Pegasus and Admiral Cain,''' reports Moore, ''because everyone missed her.'' And we'll get to see just how Cylon agent Gina (Tricia Helfer), a ''Six'' model, went from posing as a systems analyst to the beaten, raped, and tortured prisoner in the Pegasus brig eventually responsible for axing Adm. Cain.
But Razor isn't just confined within the Pegasus bulkheads. ''Along the way,'' says Moore, ''we also do things like flash back to the original Cylon wars 40 years ago. We see a young [William] Adama [who will be played by a younger actor, not Edward James Olmos] fighting in a Viper. We move around quite a bit in the chronology of the series.'' Although that chronology won't include any sort of resolution to the season 3 cliffhanger, Moore does guarantee that ''there are some things that happen in Razor that set up things in the fourth season.''
Yeah, about that fourth season: ''It's very big,'' promises Moore. ''We're moving very strongly into the finale of the show. It's about getting to Earth, and what does Earth mean, and what is it, and where is it.'' Along with previously announced guest star Lucy Lawless (who'll pop up again for a few episodes as messianic Cylon D'Anna Biers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine alum Nana Visitor will appear in an episode as a cancer patient undergoing treatment with President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell). Oh, and Moore says that, yes, he does know who the final unknown Cylon is; yes, whoever is playing that character knows he or she has been anointed; but no, they haven't shot the reveal yet (it will most likely be in the second half of the season).
Just when we get to see that half, however, is still very much up in the air. When asked about recent reports that Battlestar's final episodes may not air until 2009, Moore is noncommittal. ''That's a possibility,'' he concedes. ''No decisions have been made in terms of airdates and how many episodes they're going to run. There's a lot of factors, everything from there are other series they're going to have on the air [to] a possibility of a writers strike and how that affects programming. It's a complicated equation and there's no answer to that yet.''
Really, though, no matter when it airs, Moore is pumped about how it will all end. ''I took the writers on a retreat over the summer for a few days and we had lengthy discussions about Earth, what it's going to be when we get there, and what it means for the show. At this point, I think we're pretty jazzed. We really liked where we ended up. It's certainly a bittersweet thing, because we know it's the end. But we're happy with the direction we're going.''
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